CHAPTER FIVE

THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD

It must be considered a matter of great moment in the history of world philosophy when a Hindu philosopher, and one rated as perhaps the greatest seer and thinker in the modern period, takes a stand on the dialectics of the spiritual life that comes close to reversing the age-long traditional attitude of Indian thought on the pivotal philosophical questions with which this essay is dealing. It is a definitely unique event when a Hindu expositor accords to the life of the body, its senses and feelings, and to the mind a place of equal value with the postulated intuitions of the transcendental consciousness and the supermind. This epochal phenomenon is, however, what one finds in the books of Sri Aurobindo Ghose, particularly as set down in perhaps his chief work, The Life Divine. It is most refreshing to note a Hindu treatment of maya doctrine that regards this recondite and abstruse conception as an integral attribute of the cosmic Brahman from all eternity, and not as something introduced surreptitiously and as if by some inadvertence of deity or delinquency of man, adventitiously. And similarly it is cheering to find the great sage drawing, as it were, the sting of deception from the head of this doctrine that has beclouded the minds of so many millions of earth's citizenry.

For maya, he asserts, is the web which omnipotent deity weaves to give itself the experience of enjoying the work of its creation. Maya is that mode of being into which deity casts itself to generate the consciousness through which the delight which it seeks in world-building can come home to it. It is, so to say, part of its repertoire, a device it utilizes to accomplish what it desires.

Historians tell us that Christianity swept in on the crest of a wave of credulity that rode westward to Syria and Judea from its point of initial impulse in India. Its general Hindu character was manifest in its strong bent to deprecate the values of mundane existence and experience, to taint it with the imputation of hostility and detriment to the interests of the soul and to besmirch it with the obloquy of evil nature. In consequence religious interest tended to switch its focus and arena from the world of nature and the life in body over to the hypothecated glories of the supermind and the celestial coefficient of consciousness. The hope of miracle and

spiritual magic supplanted the confidence in natural law and the day-to-day beneficence of world experience. "Great pan was dead," the early Christians shouted, fiercely exulting in the belief that a fanatical zealotry and paroxysms of pietistic supernaturalism would open the gates of Paradise on their entranced vision and obviate for them the necessity of progressing over the long road of evolution to divinity under nature's rigid ordinances. The old dispensation of the severity of law and exact justice was abrogated, they proclaimed, and all old things were to be swept away and a new heaven and a new earth would burst upon their gaze as the great surge of the love of Christ and the mercy of God renewed all hearts. When earth, the body and its interests became as filthy rags in the sight of God, heaven became the cynosure of all enraptured eyes, till not even the lion's gory claws could dim those ecstatic visions of the beatific glory in the skies.

If the vile body and the deceptive interests of the world blocked off the soul's approach to this celestial blessedness, the lion's rending paw was a welcome opener of the door to Eden regained. And ever since, both in East and West, the fundamental idea of the conception of sainthood has been a withdrawal of all interest in secular events and world life and a burying of the soul in a life of abstraction and introversion. Experience gained through the ordinary means of the ego's contact with the external fringe is a contamination of the spirit. Only within the deeper recesses of the soul, and these only capable of being discovered when the gaze is lifted from the world, are the enduring treasures of the divine mind to be found. Deep within man's consciousness lay the enchanted kingdom of heaven, where omniscient knowledge, light and bliss bathed the soul in felicity. And, said modern and much ancient spiritual science, this state of blessedness was to be induced by the practice of closing off the consciousness from the world without and concentrating it upon the vacancy within, until the forms of truth and the ecstasies of seraphic beatitude supervene from out the inner holy of holies. Not out in the world, but in the silence of the inner temple of consciousness could man hear the divine voice. So the resurgent sweep of the Oriental philosophy gave us a new edition of the "voice of the silence." And a flood of manuals detailing the formulas for engaging in meditation has poured over the Western world, with thousands sitting in postures calculated to ease the

body into tranquility, the better to permit the consciousness to clear its slate of all distracting elements from the side of the senses and the body. The Biblical injunctions, "be still and know that I am God," was echoed as the key shibboleth of every cult regimen, with the tacit implication that God could never be known in his world, in his work, in the music of the spheres, the ripple of brooks, the thunder tones of his storms, the crashing of his waves or the sighing of the wind in his pines. The physical universe was tabbed the enemy of the spirit and had to be shut out, the soul detached from its contacts, if cosmic benignance was to be experienced.

With all this came a definition, new to the Occident, of the self of the individual. Our true ego is not the complex of body, feelings, mind and spirit that gave the Westerner the proper conception of his being. It is the spirit alone. And to arrive at a true envisagement of his real egoity, the individual must learn to conceive of himself as that pure unit of radiance detached from all association with these lower and inferior appurtenances. He must achieve the concept of himself as a unit of spirit in the abstract, subsistent in vacuo. An extreme elaboration of the ideology even went so far as to deplore the fact that pure spirit debased and defiled itself the moment it made conjunction with putrid matter. The "malignancy of matter" took its place as a fundamental of the yoga science. And from this unbalanced view arose that theological aberration of intellectual sanity which has steeped the Western mind in morbid moronism, the fall of man from Paradise and its affiliate, the pall of sin consciousness. The real ego, then, is not the body, its sensations, its brain's ideas, or its modes of consciousness at all. It is the core of consciousness that is left when it has detached itself from the clinging spider's web of all these outer appendages. The ego is its real self when, having divested itself of all these obstructing trappings, it stands alone in the void and the silence.

What more need be said in refutation of these elements of a conjured "spiritual science" than that they are out of place, are a total missing of the mark and an utter impertinence when urged as a philosophy to be utilized for final good in the outward-moving arc of the cycle, when soul moves outward and "downward" to unite its energies with the universal atomic power to be found only in matter and the flesh? They have no relevance, no truth, nor are they practicable, except detrimentally, ruinously, to life in its cycle of mani-

festation in physical forms. They stand in direct contravention to evolution in this phase of its operation. Not withdrawal, detachment and soul isolation, but attachment, even to the point of union with matter in a final orgiastic rapture, is the way to authentic blessedness for the spirit-unit of man's divine sonship while it is on the earth. As Egypt has said, the soul migrates here (Paul says "we are a colony of heaven" settled on earth) to exchange the too ethereal ambrosia and nectar of heaven for "the bread of Seb," a more substantial nutriment for the rigors of adventure in matter's realm.

All that spiritual philosophy strains to achieve by detachment and sublimation of consciousness here on earth is completely out of harmony with the cosmic motive of the downward move to incarnation, because these objectives are set for the second and reverse phase of the round. All that the "occult" aspiration seeks to realize here by withdrawal from outward focus of life interest will be naturally achieved toward the later stages of the movement back to the empyrean. Then the raucous voices of the senses, the feelings, even at last the mind, will be stilled without any of the unnatural repressions imposed by misguided zealotry on the natural self. The arrant persuasion of mystic religionism that the soul's highest interests are to be served by forcefully detaching it from those connections it came here for the very purpose of effecting and profiting by, ends by turning the quest and the cultus of spiritual truth quite upside down. Soul came, or was sent here, in quest of earthly values which it could not get in heaven. To preach down, to deny and to vilify those values and the instrumentalities of their realization is to defeat the ends of the incarnation itself. The surcease from mortal pain, the release from the domination of consciousness by outer sense, the attainment of the peace that passeth understanding, come without strain as the migrant soul approaches the completion of its cycle. To inject these motives into the midst of the fleshly arc of the cycle when the purposes of the mundane pilgrimage are not to be fulfilled by detachment but by positive union with the physical forces, is a miscarriage of practical philosophy repugnant to the spirit of life and hostile to its prime interest.

If the general voice of Indian philosophy has consistently sounded the theme of detachment and negation over so many centuries, this in itself is to be scrutinized as a strange and portentous

circumstance, because, as it now transpires under more critical scrutiny, this note was not at all in harmony with the tenor of the venerable Vedic scripts of the divine wisdom. These hoary texts did not decry and denounce the world, nature and matter. On the contrary, they rated them as the other half, or opposite pole, of the spiritual energies and accorded them as the other half, or opposite pole, of the spiritual energies and accorded them equality of rank and importance with the spiritual. So positive was this evaluation that Radhakrishnan, eminent Hindu philosopher-statesman of present day India, in his great work on Indian Philosophy, sums up the exposition of this aspect of the Upanishad systems by saying that, according to the Vedic wisdom, for the human "to deny the world without is to destroy the god within." This single affirmation, if given the weight it legitimately should exert, would instigate a complete reversal of most Hindu spiritual bent and shift the main focus of Oriental philosophy from mystical heavens back to mother earth. The orientation of emphasis and relocation of value which it makes necessary could inaugurate a new and happier epoch in all world religion.

The view expressed by the sentence was grounded on the consideration of the great law of polarity which places the soul in affirmative relation to the negative force of matter and the body. Its coming into body to stand as the positive pole of the balance between itself and body made it entirely dependent upon its partner in the twinship for the actualization of its living potential. Its own highest faculties were, as Plotinus has so clearly demonstrated, to be brought to manifestation only out of the tension which life ever establishes between the pole-ends of spirit and matter. To attempt to eliminate or reduce the strength of the pull from either end could only result in a defeat of the purpose cosmically envisaged in the relation.

If this affirmation of the factual beneficence of the incarnation voiced in the primeval Indian philosophy is found to be substantiated, it is now receiving, after endless reiteration of an opposing view negative to earth experience, strong endorsement and a renaissance of its influence through the exposition of Radhakrishnan's illustrious compeer in philosophy, Sri Aurobindo. In his great work referred to, The Life Divine, he reiterates the pronouncements of India's Upanishadic wisdom, asserting the positive value of the earth experience, of nature and of matter. "Matter, too, is Brah-

man," he quotes from the Upanishads. The testimony of the senses is, equally with the voice of the spirit, a valid ingredient in the being of the universal Atman. Some of the trenchant sentences from his pen must be introduced to demonstrate how decisively the affirmation of the value of the world life is asserted in the writings of a most eminent Hindu thinker. The massive verdict of what he announces is virtually to declare that the philosophies urging man to seek the forms of truth within the depths of his own inner area of abstraction is to seek for them just where they will not be found.

It is to be made clear that sitting in quiet and reflecting deeply upon the problems with which life confronts the mind is not to be overtly condemned an necessarily a false or futile practice. Reflection in the silence which deep thinking requires is virtually a prerequisite for any philosophic enterprise and an essential form of exercise for spiritual culture. Profound thought in meditative silence is not the object of any attack in this connection. What is under critique is the body of theoretical correlatives that have been made accessory to the dialectic of the yoga cult practice, especially in popularized Hindu conceptions, chiefly the presumption that the outer world must be shut out of consciousness because it is alleged to be a hindrance to the apprehension of truths as to which its sensual testimony speaks always a false message. The position here to be reasserted with the strong support of Aurobindo's incisive dialectic is that, while silence is a proper and propitious adjunct, an influence favorable to profound realizations, the silence itself is not to be considered a magic-land in which the forms of truth lie in a darkness that is to be pierced by the light shining in an emptied mind. That is to say that silence itself is not a voice of truth, or a magical agent of its revelation. It is simply an aid to contemplation, not itself an utterer of verity. Indeed unless the mind of the contemplative brings into its cloistered retreat the elements for the fruitful exercise of faculty, it is as likely as not to leave thought as blank as its own emptiness. The true magic-worker in the case is not the silence, but the power which the ancient seers always termed the great "magician," the power of mind. The negative spiritual ideology would still the very power by which the ego might work the magic of its divinization.

And silence is by no means certified as the only or even the best external condition or agency for the soul's exaltations. Music

is not silence, and music can lift the ego-consciousness to sublime heights, when silence would leave it stolid and inert. Many an individual would testify that music has bathed his soul in an aura of cathartic afflation which no other mode of spiritual stimulus could yield it. The shrilling song of a meadow-lark on a May morning can do for a receptive spirit what silent brooding could never do. The morning threnody of the winter wind outside the house or the murmuring breeze in the boughs of a pine tree speak a magic language that silence could never utter. Mind is a faculty of consciousness that can perform its function only when it has factual data to work upon. The cult theory is that it is a hindrance because it blocks the path to a higher mode of consciousness. It is difficult to understand how that faculty which enables a living entity to safeguard its own safety, to make its choice of good action over evil, to follow the dictates of wisdom and reject those of folly, to grow intelligent instead of remaining ignorant, can be in any way an obstacle to the soul's highest good. If there is to be developed a conscious power higher than that of the mind, it must come forth to function only after all "lower" faculties have been evolved to the limit of their capabilities, and not through the reaching down of a higher to "kill" the ones below it. Powers developed at all levels are to subsist and function beside each other in a harmony, and the deployment of the last power is to gather up and synthesize all preceding it as the perfected chord of the cycle's whole gamut of tones. Only in the sense that the earliest and lowest modes of conscious being are finally assimilated into the consummative blending of all tones in an ultimate harmony can it be said that an evolving ego uses a higher power to kill a lower.

For the mind to gain proficiency in the power to focus its point of consciousness upon one thing, it must have some one thing to fix it upon. It can not focus on vacancy, although even this extreme of futile practice has at times been urged in Hindu systems. For the most part, only vacancy of mind has been the net result of the great cult effort to make the mind one-pointed. When abstraction is carried to its utmost limit, nothing is left to meditate upon.

Aurobindo states all this so clearly that henceforth there will be no excuse for further exploitation of untenable views in the case.

"Our mind works best and with a firm confidence when it is given a substance to work on, or at least to use as a base for its

operation, or when it can handle a cosmic Force of which it has acquired knowledge . . . It is sure of its place when it has to deal with actualities; this rule of dealing with objective or discovered actualities and proceeding from them for creation is the reason for the enormous success of physical science."

And who shall say nay to the correlative assertion that the small success of passive in-pointed meditation is due to the fact that the effort is made to have the mind work on fantasy or in vacancy, with nothing to serve as the point of focus? So here the great modern Hindu sage takes a stand against the claim that the mind blocks the outflow of a more dynamic inner mode of consciousness. He is party to the opposite assertion that to close off the mind from outer actuality and to go within for the discovery of forms of eternal truth, is to go precisely away from where those forms are to be found. For, says this profound thinker, in turning the mind from the outer into the inner, the movement goes from the world of form and structure into a world of the formless and the indeterminate. The external world provides for contemplation the actual forms of created reality, which must speak the truth of the cosmic mind. In the inner subjective area there are only such forms as the human at the stage of his present development can project there. And there is no guarantee that the forms he is capable of projecting at the moment owe their origin to anything other than wayward fancy, feeble and erroneous human thinking, or even emotional hysteria or abnormal morbidity. They may or may not match the true forms of being already existent in the world outside. In stepping out of the existent world into that of purely subjective consciousness, one goes away from a world that is part of the cosmos of the divine creation, the world of law and order, and plunges into one that is really no world, but a limbo of every sort of disordered human aberrancy. Yet in it the cult thesis promises us that we shall find reality, as the world of divine creation here can not show it to us.

In going within we go from the world of the many-sided epiphany of deity back toward the world of unity; and the divinity only reveals his glorious nature in the outer many, never in the inner oneness. He can build nothing with but one stone; he must have unlimited smaller stones to enable him to construct his infinitely varied designs. We go from the manifest creation, where the hidden

nature of true being is put on display for our instruction and edification, back into the dark void of the unmanifest. In unity of being all is blank uniformity. The mind has nothing, as Aurobindo says, to take hold of, to base any reflection upon. Thought stagnates, as does the body, when it has nothing to supply it with stimulus and nourishment. In going within, we go from things to no-thing.

If truth be told, it is quite likely that this outcome is the experience of practically all, especially in the Occident, who have studiously endeavored to follow Oriental prescription for the practice of meditation in the silence. Many trying it have found this to be the case and give it up, and thenceforth resolved to set their minds to work on specific matters and problems connected with, or suggested by, the actualities of the life in this world,--and found a stable satisfaction from that time onward.

The power which pure subjectivism can exert to derationalize human mentation can be seen as terribly subtle and insidious when it is noted that philosophy of this strain asserts in its extreme application not only that for liberation the mind, in the wake of the senses and the emotions, must be killed out, but that the individual self, too, must be destroyed. We are asked or adjured to abolish ourselves as entities. It is interesting to see what our eminent Hindu philosopher has to say as to that:

"Yet it is in the mind and its form of life and body that we exist on earth; and, if we must abolish the consciousness of mind, life and body in order to reach the One Existence, consciousness and bliss, then a divine life here is impossible."

If a modern Hindu voice utters a refreshing message of sanity on this score, so has a voice of the "Biblical times" that we call ancient, one that has gained a world hearing in the pages of canonized Scriptures. St. Paul beautifully states that "God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God . . . But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us." What God has put in earthen vessels can be relied upon; what we attempt to embody in our thought structures can claim no such certitude. Paul's statement is a much-needed reminder to us that we are humans on earth and not wispy seraphim in heaven. His declaration can be of service in

jolting idealist visionaries out of their trance and bringing them back into this world, where divine love has placed them for their education. Always their ideology strains after the heaven state, for the attainment of which naturally they have to predicate and preach the destruction of every vestige of the earth consciousness. But the soul is on earth for express purposes under the ordinances of the cosmic intelligence; to defeat these ends by nullifying the modes of cognition essential to their achievement is to flout and defy the will of the eternal Providence.

Virginia Moore, in her charming survey of the varied attitudes of many peoples toward death, Ho For Heaven, summarizes the sharp contrast between the views of the Greeks and the Hindus as to the dead in two epigrammatic sentences:

"The Hindus despised the body, living or dead. The Greeks loved the body and despised it dead, only because it could no longer support that all-important present consciousness."

This says that the Greeks were in love with life here; the Hindus, on the contrary, hated life in body and bore up with it only under stern, sullen philosophical sufferance. We might search through whole libraries and not find so sententious a statement in support of the position taken in this essay as that penned by Miss Moore. Here is disclosed with perfect frankness the ground and root cause of all of India's earth-hating ideologies. It may be disputed; the characterization may be alleged to be too sweeping, too dogmatic; reservations would diminish the sharpness. Nevertheless this is the conclusion to which a singularly discerning student, along with numberless others, has been led by extensive reading. Her utterance is made not as a personal opinion, but as an accepted fact in the academic world.

As India conceived a shuddering repugnance to the body, the Greeks, says Miss Moore, "had a fundamental horror of living apart from the body." The Greek would rather be a lowly one on earth than a king in the realm of the dead. The moments of life here were precious jewels that could be made to sparkle with the sunny glint of joyous realizations of the magnitude and majesty of being.

If earth life be not arbitrarily ruled out as a fulcrum on which to base the lever for the uplifting of living values, and heaven alone be elected to that function, it is pertinent to institute a comparison

which would speak in almost shouting tones of the historical demonstration of the salutary influence of the Greek love of life and body, in contrast to the less wholesome result of the Hindu distaste for the life here. It is indeed seldom that history comes out with so unequivocal an object lesson on the theme that a people's philosophical attitudes and traditions set the stamp of their character on the life of whole nations or civilizations.

The Greeks loved life in the body and therefore loved the body that kept that life aglow and the earth that sustained the body. Therefore they are the nation acclaimed in world history as the people who brought the human body to its highest point of health and beauty, as the outward and visible evidence of the spirit's inward joyousness. The Hindus despised life and body and the earth which supported both. In consequence life was so burdensome that the mind developed a veritable loathing of it. The body suffered neglect, if not overt crucifixion, and speaking at large, lacked beauty. The world and the flesh lay under a cloud of constant mental disapprobation, while a despised and neglected earth barely sustained life in the millions of bodies even in a tropical land. Philosophical truths or errors can thus become matters verily of life or death to whole civilizations.

CHAPTER SIX

THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT

The wholesome influences that the soul seeks in incarnation are here on earth, else she would not have been sent here to receive the baptism of their benignant unction. To come here to obtain them, and then through fallacious persuasions to turn away from them and shut them out, is to pursue a jungle by-path to folly and disaster. To miss the influences of earth in their realistic form is to miss the fostering ministrations of the soul's true mother. Because of the nearly universal plague of religious doctrinism scorning earth and the body, we have lived for centuries in the shell of a negative tradition so solidly encrusted around us that we have never been able to receive or recognize the benign and salutary impact of nature's gracious forces. We have isolated ourselves from nature and so have broken the line of current of health that would have flowed from her dynamic springs for our life's renewal. In being sent here from on high, we have been thrust into our earth-mother's lap to partake of just such nutriment. We have been inserted, so to say, between the pages of the book of living reality in whose sentences have been inscribed the reading lessons of eternal verity, and we have not yet learned how to read the script. Out in the open field of nature, and not in the hazy and misty recesses of the brooding mind, stand the great letters of the primer of life instruction.

It may be timely to answer the prospective question as to how souls came here. If their presence here is a supportable fact, it will be wondered why the rationale of this prime item of truth has not been the quest of universal inquiry. The reason for its being kept so deep in shadow is that the great literature which had embalmed the clues to the secret, the mythologies, the Mystery rituals, the esoteric instruction in the Academies, the books of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Plutarch, the Kabalah, the Hermetic writings, the Orphic Hymns, The Chaldean Oracles, The Book of Nabothean Agriculture, the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, the Talmud and the Bible had never been read with either the keys or the power to discern their true cryptic purport. The blind violence of the Christianized Roman powers that closed the Platonic Academies in the Hellenic world, threw away the keys that might have unlocked their inner casket of mystery. The Italian Renaissance

pried open the lock and raised the lid, but not far enough to give a full clear view of the precious treasure.

How did the forms of truth come to be out there in nature? The answer is simple: the divine mind conceived them and put them there. They are there because they are the precipitated end products of its thinking. They are the physical echo of the uttered words of God's voice, his divine Word, his Logos, frozen in solid matter. The ringing tones of his voice carried the form of his divine ideas outward and ended their course in the arms of matter. His archetypal ideas were snagged by the inertia of matter and held bound in the world of visible tangible forms; and here they stand before us.

Yet these utterances of eternal truth are the very things that the errant spiritual cult votaries have for centuries been calling the deceptive husks of illusion. These things, they keep harping, give us a false message. Our senses and minds are the agencies of deception; they convey to us an untrue report on verity. India has built up her philosophies on the claimed necessity of our blotting them out. Greece, on the other hand, in the wake of hoary Egyptian sagacity, has more rationally declared that we must see the ideal truth which they adumbrate and be instructed thereby. Now the Hindu Aurobindo swings from the Indian tradition and agrees with the Greeks. This can have propitious repercussions for all the world.

If the mind of God created the world by its thinking, the world and its constituent forms embody his thoughts, his intellectual designs, his mental formulation of the cosmos to be. It must be accounted a tragic circumstance that in all the centuries of spiritual endeavor the chief forces of religion have urged us to look not at the visible work that openly reveals his mind-forms, but away from them in the dark purlieus of the humanly incompetent mind. Odd it must be considered that religious science has never directed the human thought energies to study God's handiwork. It could always have been presumed that from inspection of his finished production could be divined the nature of the mind that created it.

Yet is has been loudly proclaimed as almost the central principle of the many "new-thought" movements that "thought is creative." Man creates himself and his personal world over the pattern of what he thinks. Yet this and kindred movements failed

to point out what should have been the most immediate practical outcome of their philosophy: that God's created works must then reflect the order of his mind. They should have proclaimed that the Logos of creation lay before us in the open book of nature and that we must learn there to read what God has written.

Unsound religious theory, however, made the mistake of confusing the two worlds being created, the macrocosm, or God's world, and the human's little world, the microcosm. It leaped far ahead to the egregious and unwarranted conclusion that if thought is the creative force, then man by his thought could alter the universe, that is, the macrocosm, and so remake the world over his thought pattern. It did not reflect that the thought which created and recreates the world is God's thought, and therefore is not subject to change by man's puny intellection. The universe over which a man's thought is creative is the little universe compressed within the confines of his physical body and its immediate environment. In that world his mind can wield the magical wands of creative power. The universe is God's body and in and over it the divine mind wields the formative power. It is hardly man's prerogative to complicate the natural forces by injecting his mental decrees into their ordained regularity. But God grants full right to his sons to create their own universes, although he has distinctly told them that their creation must be over the pattern of his and employ the same principles he has used in his world building. And in order that they may have full and unrestricted opportunity to learn the configuration of his creation, as a model for their own lesser one, he has set them in the midst of his world, in which, if they will but note it, every operation bespeaks the thought that generated it, and in which every brook, tree and insect announces a principle of God's work. Even man himself will find that he is embraced in the orbit of the worlds. God is sovereign Lord over his domain; we are to imitate his work, as Plato said, but in our subordinate kingdom. "My mind to me my kingdom is," can be man's shibboleth; but my mind is not the lord in God's greater kingdom. We are cells in his immense body, it is true; but our rulership is over our cell, with a limited influence reaching out to touch other cells close to us. We do not dominate God's cosmic body.

Had our intelligence been equal to the task of rightly interpreting the Scriptures that were designed to be our guiding light,

we could long ago have been instructed where to look for the patterns over which we are to model our minor creations. For in those Scriptures the Lord orders us to build up a tabernacle in which he may be raised up,--since he had buried his creative seed deep in matter in our constitution, and therefore to us he must look to be raised in these cells of his being. And in building this house not made with hands we are instructed to "see that thou build it after the pattern that I have shown thee in the mount, the pattern of the heavens." The heavens are not in this passage the skies above our heads; they are the worlds of noumenal supernal consciousness, the heavens of divine thought. But, says God, I have shown thee the reflected image and pattern of this divine thought in the mount. And where and what is that mount? Stupid literalism grossly took it to be a hill in the triangle between Egypt and Arabia,--Mount Sinai. A more discerning interpretation locates it in the heights of illumined cosmic consciousness. But it has just been indicated that those are the "heavens." So the "mount" must be somewhere else. And, sure enough, to the blank astonishment of purblind exegetists, it transpires at last that the Biblical "mount" is just our lowly earth itself. The temptation, the divine sermon, the transfiguration, the crucifixion and the ascension, all of which are enacted in the flesh, take place "on the mount." The ark landed on Mount Ararat, and Ararat is from the Hebrew arets, the word for earth itself. The Latin word for world is mundus, the mound, the mount, earth.

So here on earth God has shown us the pattern-design of his creation, and by misreading his Scriptural instructions we have turned our gaze into the heavens, straining to read there the messages of the cosmic thought, when the pattern of it was all the while revealed to us in the world we were led to scorn and eschew. God has set the forms of his thought before us in the world, and we have sat with eyes closed, shutting out the very model that we were instructed to copy. All we need to do is to observe, study, meditate upon the visible nature, and the soul, the meaning and the glory of God's creative Logos will shine out to us in ever clearer tones of beauty.

Not hanging in the attic of our inner astral or supramental consciousness are those forms of the divine noumenon, but out there in nature, waiting to deliver their grand message when we have

learned to read their hieroglyphs. God in the Old Testament says that he will inscribe his laws in our hearts and in our minds will he write them. But how? He can not well write anything in a vacuum. He confronts our very eyes with these forms and those operations which reflect his laws, and from what our eyes can behold our minds and hearts can transfer the imprint onto their inner tablets of rationalization and memory. Divine ideas are not ghost pictures haunting people's auras. They are the actual physical and material realities into the midst of which our lives have been thrown, so that by constant contact we must eventually conform our ideation to the pattern held before us in the mount of earth. By daily association with them it is inevitable that sooner or later our intelligence will absorb their significance, will awaken to the realization that the world shows us the design of God's eternal law. For every physical object in this world there exists in the cosmic noumenal world a spiritual truth or law corresponding to it. The world is a mirror of God's mind. Spiritual law is the natural law, operating at a higher level.

Emerson tells us that "man stands midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter. He sees that the one reflects the other, that the world is a mirror of the soul; and he becomes a priest and interpreter of nature thereby." Shakespeare reminds us that there are

Tongues in trees, sermons in stones,

Books in running brooks, and God in everything.

Not alone the burning bush in the Moses story, but every common shrub is aflame with God. "God is present in all his parts in every moss and cobweb," repeats Emerson. St. Paul writes that

"that which may be known of God is manifest; for the invisible things of him from the foundation of the world are clearly seen, being understood from those things which are made, even his eternal power and Godhood."

Hardly a century ago Henry Drummond gave us his The Natural Law in the Spiritual World, which should have introduced an era of enlightenment in all religion, but has now sunk back into desuetude and oblivion. But the most direct and potent of all intimations on this score has stood unnoticed in the Talmud of the Jews for many centuries: "If thou wilt know the invisible, open wide

thine eyes on the visible." We have noted Hermes' great pronouncement that that which is below is a copy of that which is above. And in this connection it is imperative to correct the errant conception which has inspired a wrong approach to the handling of this truth of ancient sagacity. Cult philosophy has fatuously striven to work the procedure of extracting the educative value from the formula by starting the mental movement from heaven to earth. But this is taking it in the wrong direction. It has prescribed the going within, or above, where nothing is visible, to discover the clues to the meaning of what is already visible. This is folly; it is impossible. We must proceed from the known to learn about the unknown, the invisible. From the objects and processes that can be observed and studied on earth we shall be able by analogy to formulate the principles of the divine order of being in the noumenal world above. Surely ancient sagacity did not ask us to gauge the visible from looking at the invisible. Paul says that these "invisible things of God" are clearly seen. Surely not where they are invisible! Where then! In the visible creation that his hands have made, which consists of those invisible things made visible.

For nearly a century the modern resurrectors of the archaic wisdom have been mouthing the shibboleth of this truth in the form of "as above so below." There is no question of its truth as thus stated; but there is a very serious question of its applicability and its usefulness in this form. From the point of view of man on earth it is practically meaningful and workable only when put in the reverse form: as below so above. Surely if one thing is like a second, the second must be like the first. But if one is visible and the other invisible, it is workable for actual enlightenment only if the procedure is from the one seen to the other unseen.

At one stroke the reversal of the direction in which the comparison is handled brings all religion back to earth for its meanings. The reoriented view shows that the pathway to heaven runs through the valley of earth. The Jacob's ladder by which soul-angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth rests its base on the earth.

Paul enjoins us to let that same mind be in us which was in the Christ principle. Man is made in the image and likeness of his Father creator, and therefore man's mind must reflect the same ideation as the intellect of its parent. But where has that ideation

already been manifested, put on view? In the forms and phenomena of nature. If we would see them where they are, we must look for them in the open field of the visible creation. It needs only that we put on the spectacles of the proper clarity and mental focus and we shall see the glory and the majesty of the supernal light of truth that nature reflects. God has expressed and therefore revealed himself in nature, his handiwork. He has put his soul into his work. Look there and one can greet that soul. The vision will transfigure the beholder. As St. Paul beautifully puts it:

"And we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image, from glory unto glory."

He who can feel God's presence only in a temple may be uplifted on a Sabbath; he who can discern him in nature can be transfigured every day in the week.

It registered as one of the most engaging truths the mind could ever come to apprehend when it came clear that our so-called laws of nature are the fixed activities of God's subconscious mind. This can be grasped as obvious truth if we reflect that the memory capability of mind is simply the strengthening of an impression or thought through repetition. God's primal conscious thoughts became permanently impressed on primordial matter through repetition or steady holding. Thoughts, like actions, become automatic by repetition. That is, they reproduce themselves without further attention from conscious mind. Life always subsists where a unit of consciousness functions in a body which polarizes and supports and instrumentalizes it. As the body is the product of the mind that it feeds, the result is that life everywhere imposes its modes and forms of thought upon the body. By repetition it causes the body to express and carry out what it aims to do and to be. So the fixed lines of thought become the fixed laws, the habitudes of the body. The body becomes the mind's kingdom of expression, its showground of epiphany. So those laws of life and mind which God says he will write upon his children's hearts and minds are his own creative archetypal ideas, now solidly materialized in nature. Having repeated them often enough, he turns them over permanently to the care of his automatic memory, his subconscious. He transmits them to the care and keeping of the body, which faithfully

executes them. Thus the body becomes the soul's avenue of its urge to express itself in the outer worlds. When the body picks them up and runs on with them, the higher conscious mind is freed to do new thinking for its future planning.

So that it becomes man's task simply to match in his consciousness and constitution the mind of God. This was the gist of Paul's admonition to us. And not inside the void that stretches above the range of our natural faculty, but outside in the world of the concrete actual, are found these forms of divine ideation to which man is to conform the pattern of his creative effort. Man is the child of God and never does this child go inside his own head for guidance and education; always he receives instruction from outside, from an authority and a wisdom above his own. As a child he starts in ignorance. His mind is an unwritten slate until from his tutelage based on study of what he finds external to him in the world, or from the transmitted wisdom of teachers before him, he begins to do his own writing of acquired and self-tested knowledge upon his tablet of understanding. Never can he go inside, sit placidly in expectation and look for the blank slate, so to say, to write itself full of supernal truth. He can not write out of a background of ignorance and vacuity. On his slate he will come in time to write those things which has been discerned in nature and from her abstracted by the mind's power to trace analogies. For there is scarcely any concept, spiritual recognition or cosmic principle, no matter how abstruse and abstract, that is not found expressed through the semantic intermediacy of some natural analogue in the external world. Whatever the human consciousness writes on its slate will be found at base to match, or be matched by, some fact in the world outside. It is impossible that it could match its ideas with those of the cosmic mind in the complete blankness and emptiness of its own initial states.

Man must fill the void of his intelligence with those things that will reproduce in himself a cosmos matching a larger one already formed. Let us hear our Hindu philosopher on this point: "For always mind must be identical with Supermind." He has said that our mind works best when given something substantial to work on. He says again and again that mind must deal with real being. But by a queer misturn of philosophical dialectic and specious logic the world of real being has been declared to be, not the actual world

outside, but that potential inner world subsistent in the unfathomable depths or rarefied heights of inner consciousness, which cult theory makes so tenuous that it must almost be described as inner unconsciousness. It in fact, on the presuppositions of cult theory itself, becomes not a world at all, but a void. Real being persists wherever there is a consciousness that can register its actualities. But when man essays to follow it beyond the range of his capabilities he loses touch with it and roams homeless in a barren desert. It can only become for him a world of real being when he can respond consciously to its tempo of vibration. There are untold areas of real being stretching out above man's present reach, but into which he can not roam with profit.

If by the world of real being reference had been unequivocally directed to the objective cosmos outside in nature, the sad wreckage of high philosophy would not have supervened, and we would have known all along where to look for instruction. Yes, the mind must build not in vacuity but in real being. It can not build its own cosmos arbitrarily or without regard to the cosmos to whose frame and design its own must conform. To do otherwise would be for it to step out of its own groove of being, its own line of evolution; in fact to undo itself, wreck and destroy itself. Its great work is to reproduce in itself the cosmos that is. So it must study the cosmos that is, observe its modes, habits, laws, catch its spirit and thus reproduce itself in its likeness.

In somewhat more technical language Aurobindo asserts this same positive fact. If, he says, we strive to lift ourselves out of the present realm of actuality into the unity of the Supreme Consciousness, we find ourselves in a world of indeterminables. In the absolute being there is, and can be, no specific character to anything. It is the world of no-thingness, because it is the world of unity. No part of it is different from any other part; it is homogeneous throughout. It is what the philosophers have called "the Boundless." Aurobindo remarks: "To be shut up in a featureless consciousness of unity, in ignorance of the manifested Brahman, is described also as a blind darkness." It is into this blind darkness that the most lauded forms of spiritual meditation will take one, the more certainly if the aim is to consciously abstract the mind from the actual world of real being into an alleged world of an hypothecated more real being, which turns out to be sheer emptiness.

At any rate all meditation must start from and be based on an actual world. It must build with the materials and on the premises furnished by the actual world lying outside. It can not be otherwise, when the soul comes fresh from the point of creation by its Father and has had as yet no experience by which any knowledge, truth or science of being could have been acquired. It starts out from the infancy of consciousness. It has not knowledge, but only the potential knowledge. As Aurobindo observes, it will not have material with which to build until it gathers it from the world outside. And if that world is treated with mental disdain and let go unnoticed, the soul will gather no building materials from it. It is in fact sent here in order to get the building blocks which are units of reality, so that it may be able to construct its miniature universe in harmony with the cosmic plan. It is from outside itself that it will obtain the forms and the pattern of the basic elements which it can ratiocinate into the principles of understanding. The pattern and the forms lie without, though the power that can rate them for meaning is latent within.

This sharp differentiation can chart a new path for culture to follow out of misty vagueness of "spiritual philosophy" into a true soul science. It will for the first time since Aristotle give to the religious effort its proper form and direction. It will save that effort from dissipating its energy out into vacuity. It will enable it to carry its enterprise of grasping real being forward to a far more vivid and realistic sense of accomplishment.

Aurobindo says that the objects of the world, our sense images, are representations of the constructive, creative ideas of God's Mind. They are therefore symbols, as he says, "of a truth which our lives are trying to express." It is a purblind philosophy that ignores them, holds them in contempt and denounces them as testifying falsely to us, when they are the symbols of the truths we were sent here to master, symbols indeed of the laws of our own being. But because India has originated the specious canard that a symbol is not a true thing because it is not the reality of the thing it symbolizes, the thing-in-itself, a world teeming with symbols of truth and reality has been scorned as a world of unreality and untruth. Even if the shallow view can be considered the truth--which it can not be, since the world objects are the things-in-themselves embodied in matter--it would be a slander on real objectivity, be-

cause it is unfair to condemn a thing for not being something that it makes no pretense at being, something other than what it is. A world object is a symbol, and it is unjust to condemn a symbol for not being the thing its symbolizes. This would be to denounce a portrait of a man for not being the man himself. Aurobindo confutes attitude when he says that our sense-images are "completely valid," because they represent not fiction or falsity, but real being. This pronouncement is so directly contradictory to the general cry of the invalidity of our sense experience that it merits the rating of epochal. When the function of an image is to represent something which can not be apprehended by sensible perception, it should not be charged with falsity and deception for failing to do more than represent. Its function is faithfully fulfilled in representing. The only fair criterion is whether it does faithfully represent what it stands for. And on this basis the objects of nature fully meet the test of validity.

The fault of so much negative preachment is found in its failure to know that the outer world does with absolute fidelity mirror the inner. It fails to know that nature symbols speak a true language, not a false one; that they are not to be spoken of as "mere" symbols, but symbols of something, and that something a true essence of being. There has been a fatal loss of primal knowledge that the outer and inner worlds are but the two facets of one and the same reality. The science of semantics has passed into desuetude because this inseparable identity of the two phases of reality had been lost sight of. The accepted definition of a sacrament should long ago have awakened the recognition of the verity of nature symbolism: it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. How is man's mind to conceive the form and meaning of things noumenal and invisible except it receive intimations of their nature from their representatives in the visible area? Human minds are to be populated with ideal forms conceived over the pattern of things presented to experience.

The cult religions of the sort referred to have insistently emphasized mystical exaltation in the inner spheres of consciousness as being the short, sometimes allegedly instantaneous, road to human deification. The slogan has always been "spiritual mysticism," by which the individual unit of consciousness arrives at a realization of the presence of God or of its own identity with the be-

ing of God. Through an ineffable mystical afflation the soul rises to an enraptured state, a sublimation of feeling and knowing that floods the self with illumination.

But this fails to discriminate between a mysticism that can be good, fine, real and truly supernal to ordinary human grades of consciousness, and one that can in fact prove to be untrue to verity and miss the mark of genuine upliftment entirely. Mystical experiences can be baneful, senseless, erratic, destructive; they can be delusive, misleading and injurious. Modern psychology says they can often be "pure fantasy," founded on no basis of reality at all. Mysticism of the sort can lead to "seeing things" that are not in any way related to reality, but are phantoms of an unbridled imagination. It can indeed even lead to mental disorder, dementia, insanity, which in the main is just the matter of seeing things that are dissociated from reality and mistaking them for actual things.

And all this irrational mysticism comes from the courting of fanciful images in "meditation" in the empty halls of the mind, where there is nothing related to reality by which to gauge their authenticity for consciousness. It would be seen and made authoritative in the science of mind that a mysticism that carries its own credentials of divine sanction is always one that is grounded directly upon an actual base in natural reality. A large segment of the affectional life in humans is and must be of the mystical sort. Whatever affects us emotionally and aesthetically is of mystical order. The distinction as to whether the exalted feelings are wholesome and salutary, or the opposite, is to be discovered by noting whether they spring from baseless fancy, of purely subjective origin, or from the experience with actualities. Such forms of mysticism as the moving power of music, the emotion of friendship, the love of beauty, romantic passion, love of nature, feelings generated by the awesomeness of natural phenomena, the highest transports of delight, joy, wonder, awe, the noblest elevations of feelings, our divinest upliftments,--all these are forms of a mysticism that draws its genuineness from sources undeniably real. Music, nature, a loved person, an object's beauty, nobility of character, warmth of devotion are solid realities, components of the environment that is meant to generate wholesome influences in the human psyche. In such high mystical moments the living nature retains its regulative hold on the mounts of the mind by keeping them tied to reality. If the

introvert method, as it aims deliberately to do, cuts its tie with its bases in reality, it risks drifting or darting off into by-paths of errant fancy, which all too readily hypostatizes its creations as realities. The heroic aspiration of the noble human spirit is to march "in tune with the infinite." It might be said that a humbler and more practical ambition would be to keep the human life "in tune with the actual." To be sound and truly cathartic, mysticism must maintain its direct connection with the verities of the earth and the objective nature. As long as this link is maintained the influences flowing from the original precipitation of the divine ideas into embodied forms will be beneficent. But if the currents from the actual creation be cut off, if the psyche be uprooted from its supporting ground-bed in nature, the fruit of the psychological tree of life will be hybrid at best and unnourishing. To be maintained in health, minds must be kept rooted in the actual world. For this they migrated to earth. Here they behold God's thoughts actualized. And if it be remembered that one's own mentation, if it be wayward, can hypnotize one, with the dire result of making an imagined fiction world turn into a real world for the subject, the danger of tragic mental aberrancy looms large.

It becomes increasingly evident that the great prevalence of psychic neurosis in the present world can be traced largely to the gross and massive tendencies in the religious culture to exalt the spirit and disparage matter, the world and the body, which thus destroy the healthful relation between the two ends of the polarity in the individual's life. It is true enough for restatement that millions of people have wrecked their lives by accepting the religious infatuation that nature and life itself are hostile to the interests of their immortal souls.